This smacks as unreliable to me because I have a "Devils advocate" sort of mindset REGARDLESS of my actual level of expertise. I find the issue with this sort of mindset is that it makes you better at tearing down other peoples opinions than it does at coming up with a brilliant opinion of your own. This is problematic when you're trying to do something innovative in a crowded saturated field.
> useful opinions based on the practical experience of making stuff work
A kind of opinions from people who are far from being established experts in a particular area are called "a fresh look" and may occasionally happen to be useful too as well as opinions of people who are more of generalists and theorists than specialists and practics. Opinions from skilled experts may occasionally happen to be a way too biased.
> Opinions on the best x are largely useless... half of it wasn’t a debate on why JS is good/shit and how WASM is the next Jesus?
If they uncover a lot about why and do it concisely I would not consider them useless.
Does this fit your example: My first job out of school was as a developer on WordPerfect for Windows.
In short order I came to believe there were strategic mistakes being made (not the mistakes we made in code, mistakes at the exec level), as if there were a bubble or echo chamber around certain decisions, and that these strategic errors were an existential threat to the company.
Dozens of highly paid people working on OS/2 ports, and other non mainstream platforms. Not paying enough attention to performance even as it started to hurt product reviews, because Microsoft steadily invested tons of time into optimization. Many other similar things.
I asked for sit downs with some execs to offer alternative viewpoints on a few of these issues as food for thought. They listened, and watched, a early 20’s kid who looked 18, articulate these points.
Should I have not tried to be an “expert” with three months of experience? Should they have at least allowed a second, broader meeting with key people to air out contrarian ideas? Surely I wasn’t the only one who saw these things. Could they have avoided wiping a billion dollars in value off the books if they had more seriously listened to a more diverse set of opinions and ideas?
To be clear, sometimes less experienced people come with crazy, clearly impractical, even arrogant ideas that are not fully thought through. These should be constructively criticized and usually dismissed. Just remember, it’s not that unusual for experienced professionals to do the same thing.
How is experience relevant at all except probabilistically? Ideas and approaches speak for themselves. They either have merit or they don’t.
Should we ignore someone who keeps talking about how he can make a strong case for redefining our fundamental knowledge of physics? I mean the hell he’s not even a physicist he’s just a patent clerk without a PhD (not 100% certain but if I recall correctly there were interesting results before that degree was earned). More than one person had a chance to listen and didn’t.
Of course my experiences and biases over the years have lead to this opinion, but I will never dismiss out of hand an argument that at first glance seems to be made in good faith, and appears to have had careful thought put into it.
Moreover, if the argument has these attributes, and is also contrary to what I believe while a being business critical.topic, I’m more likely to read or hear it, at least until I’m sure it’s not a perspective I have already thoroughly considered.
> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality
No, it's just that it's not interesting when an expert is right about their domain expertise so we don't talk about it.
The issue is people getting skewed by this and then inferring that it must mean, on average, that their outsider opinion is as valid as experts, but really, it's not.
It is an obviously wrong approach. There are plenty of intelligent people out there, this doesn't keep them from being occasionally wrong. If you have access to the opinion of people who devoted their whole lives to the field in question, why would you seek it from an influencer that perhaps gained fame from being an authority in a couple of non-related fields?
There's this pattern I've noticed — chiefly, though not exclusively, amongst us nerds — where, when something doesn't comport with our individual, personal experience, it's immediately judged not merely to be wrong, but obviously wrong, and fatally flawed.
It's like another, equally ugly face to the attitude, broadly held by the general population in the US, that "My opinion is just as valid as your facts", except it's "My expertise trumps [1] anyone else's equally valid, hard-earned, and applicable expertise!"
I really don't get it. And it's a thing I still, after years of work on, struggle with in myself.
Any thoughts on why we, a subset of the population that tends to be defined by priding itself on its intelligence and rationality, can be so egregiously head-up-its-own-ass like this?
Taking your claim to heart would require a person to be so focused on becoming an expert (in an academic environment where new studies are constantly published) that they would be so focused on staying abreast of their expertise that they would be unable to comment at all-- for fear of missing some study somewhere. It would require a fanatical obsession with gaining all information and perspectives that one would be precluded from commenting at all: for fear of not being a 100% perfect expert.
Hence, I think one can cite studies without being a 100% perfect expert on all angles within a discipline.
I think your claim lacks introspection to be honest.
>"Most software engineering jobs aren't predominantly about things rather than people"
First I ask "Relative to what?" But let's backup: You state a claim of ratio, "most".
"A claim of ratio, "most" "--
If we're getting into ratios of people within occupations, then I would ask for a quantitative assessment, though I suspect no confident, non-subjective one exists, to prove your point.
"Relative to what?"--
I suspect people's experiences differ-- in my near future, I will be working on an engineering team. However, even there-- I suspect I will largely be sitting at a computer, typing into it for hours, rather than interfacing directly with a human for hours (as I previously did in Sales roles).
Ultimately I dispute your claim via my personal experience: Working on projects (mostly by myself at this point) where I am programming for 6 hours per day and have little human contact, yet still accomplish project goals and receive my paycheck.
This is a tone argument, obviously. You'll have more access to a broader range of opinions if you eliminate fallacies like this from your thinking.
Consider, an expert becomes an expert through their passion and dedication to a topic. If you eliminate emotion from your resources, you eliminate many knowledgeable people.
Sibling comment is basically what I meant and my general opinion about the linked website as well.
> You're basically saying that being more knowledgeable about something makes your opinion less useful.
In certain contexts I definitely think this. Imagine you're a CEO that has to decide how to distribute profits among departments. Obviously you'll listen to the head/experts of every department to weigh your options, but you can't really trust them to be unbiased (Obviously not the best analogy but I hope it helps get my point across (: ).
> "a fresh look" and may occasionally happen to be useful
The use of three words to hedge the usefulness aspect, somewhat contradicts the original assertion of opinions being undervalued.
I happen to agree that a fresh look, in the form of an opinion from a non-expert, can be extremely valuable, especially since I'm acutely aware that I'm certain to be biased on any topic where I have expertise from experience. However, that value seems to be proportional to how well-informed it is.
That is, if the opinion is based on insufficient knowledge (that can be obtained other than by experience, such as with a Web search), it can easily result in a subtle form of talking past each other that doesn't reveal itself until after a long back-and-forth. Sadly, that mostly just reveals fundamental gaps in knowledge, rather than any fresh perspective.
I guess that "putting opinions aside and only asking about fields which you yourself deeply understand" is actually very very hard to consistently apply in practice ?
If that was really true, it's be a safer bet to dismiss what experts in a given field think and just go with what the uninformed population's opinion is on the matter.
E.g. to dismiss scientific opinion on a topic to go instead with lay opinions on it
Often the problem is that the guy who has made something his career posts incorrect things more often than the guy who hasn't. Some of the reasons for these are:
- self-interest
- intentionally since it protects their interests
- accidental since they've spent so much time they need it to be meaningful
- accidental since they want to please their fellow experts
- intentionally since they want to go with the herd
- selection bias towards being someone who cares about this very much goes with lack of aptitude
- historical bias
- most people are better equipped than experts to spot paradigm shifts because experts are over-indexed on the status quo
- no field expertise
Ultimately, it's up to you how you weight people's opinion, and may each person's epistemology serve them appropriately.
He doesn't say that crazy ideas by domain experts always work out. He makes two claims:
1) That if the crazy idea is from a domain expert, it deserves to be taken seriously. It doesn't deserve to be taken as gospel, but it shouldn't be dismissed outright.
2) He's betting (but not stating as fact) that if you did blindly support the crazy ideas of domain experts, you'd be right more often than you're wrong.
This is not the same thing as saying domain experts are always right. Simply that all things being equal, you're better off betting on their expertise over your own ignorance. But even better than that is to look into the matter until you have sufficient expertise to properly evaluate their idea.
Agreed, though this can be easily taken too far [or not far enough... depending how you see it]. I find it helpful to research enough to know the landscape, but not enough to form an opinion. Unless I plan on doing a lot of research to become an expert, I find it easy to form opinions that require massive nuance to matter.
Yes, I'm suggesting that their viewpoint might be biased by their expertise -- not that all with expertise share that same bias. I have some Apple devices for exactly that same reason.
The best we can say is that if there is a strong consensus among experts that it is, to the best of our current knowledge, correct.
It's at least more correct than someone with zero training in that field. Dissenting opinions among experts should also be considered, by such experts, and the points at which they disagree with the logic or knowledge carefully examined by all.
> I never said that technical expertise makes my experience more (or less) important.
But then immediately dive into a long winded explanation of why your own personal opinions are superior. If you have some deeply academic reason for not likening something, but millions of user just absolutely love how shiny it is, then you can’t prove they’re wrong for doing so, nor that your opinion is in any way better or more valuable than theirs.
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